The Travelin' Librarian

The manuscript of my next book Searching 2.0 has been reviewed by an outside (non-publisher) reviewer and things are looking good. Although the reviewer agreed to allow her comments to be used in  pre-publicity I’ve not asked them about quoting here so I’ve removed identifiable details. This isn’t the full review but you’ll get the point.

Truly, this is one of the most useful books I’ve read this year… It came just in time for me personally to continue my own professional development. The information is accessible for Web 2.0 tool beginners. However, the application of the tools and the full information he provided about the ways in which the tools work was clear enough to give me the extra bits I need to know about and organize the ideas for me. I’m recommending this book to my friends at [a large well known academic institution] as I type this up.

One thing I really found useful and will consider adapting for my own teaching are his ‘mental exercises’ to explain what he is trying to say.

He convinced me to try Delicious again – I’ve tried it but find it a pain to share so now with his instructions I’m going to re-attempt the idea.

…if this were a workshop I’d attend somehow. I really want a final copy of this book – I have printed out the draft rather than just reading it online because I want to go back through it and find some quotes and ideas that I will use in my own workshops. I will cite properly.

I will be adding it to the reading list for the…courses I teach. I will – and have – recommend it to my colleagues as well.

[ChapterOne] is a short workshop in the basics in itself. The discussion of folksonomies vs. taxonomies clarified the issue for me in a way I can make use of in my teaching and research. Convergence, Remixability, and Participation discussions place the whole big Web 2.0 snarl into neatly understandable justifications for using Web 2.0 tools in the providing library services. Most other justifications I’ve read or listened to at conferences emphasize only the participation piece and that is not enough to justify extensive time and labor spent on these tools. Convergence is a great concept for justifying it. Remixability gave me some neat ideas that I hope I have time to implement in my own work this winter.

[Chapter Three] will be very effective in clarifying for librarians when and why to use Web search engines and when and why to bookmark or otherwise create a knowledgebase of what they find when they do use them so they can more efficiently re-use good results.

Wikipedia [Chapter Four] is such a touchy subject for librarians – [a certain listserv] has an ongoing argument when the topic is re-broached. Next time it comes up I will post a citation for this book and chapter for those who are confused or being fed bad information to use to learn the facts.

[The rest of the book contains] good discussions of specific search tools. Again even though I am not a beginner at this I picked up either some new information about each tool that will be useful in my work and teaching, but also good thoughts and ideas to use in my teaching. I never thought about teaching students to search their own desktop… good idea. Not sure how I’d teach it web-based though.

Just when I thought the long dark tunnel that has been the writing of this book was never going to end I read this. This has totally made my day!